


No Matter Where They Take Me, In Death I Will Survive

by stardustedknuckles



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Gen, October Prompt Challenge, Resurrection, Sacrifice, Shock, Temporary Character Death, but not set a any real point, chapter 4 is fanart, dope lightning god shit, i'll be screaming about it forever, lots of blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:08:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27074737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustedknuckles/pseuds/stardustedknuckles
Summary: Yasha was taken from them - first literally, in the night, and then in every way that mattered. The battle is won, but even with their plans to bring her back as soon as spells allow, there is aftermath. But where there is pain, there is also healing - and the nein have much in the way of experience with both.A lot of things almost went unsaid.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Caleb Widogast, Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Caleb Widogast & Yasha
Comments: 40
Kudos: 295





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah so I've been feeling the angst building for a while. Apparently "gags" as a prompt (day 17) was the key to letting the gates swing open. There's a drawing of Yasha in the CR art book that I haven't been able to get out of my head. It's just a sketch, a concept really, but it lodged in there on sight.

When it came down to it, Caleb had seen more of Beau than maybe anyone in the nein. With his eyes, yes - she was feisty, direct, awkward, rude, loyal almost to a fault. But as cliché as it sounded, he had also seen her with his heart - raw, defensive, joyful, drunk, and a hundred other things in the quieter moments she trusted only him with. He knew that she couldn't sleep alone, would sneak into his room on the rare occasion they got one each to themselves - his, because he wouldn't ask questions no matter how well-meaning. He knew the heart of her, the fierce spark that burned brighter than any of his flames, had seen the upper limit of what humans were capable of in her.

He had seen her cracked, after Kamordah. He had seen the hurt she hid when Vilya left, and he had seen her shoulder the feeling and work her way through it as she did everything: with unerring resolve.

Caleb had never seen Beau _broken_.

He approached her carefully, making noise she would - should - be able to hear. His own breath seemed loud in his ears, and from the dull clouds overhead it seemed he could feel eyes on his back, on Beau…on Yasha.

To see his friend in this state - gagged and bound by the wrists to a post driven into the ground behind her, kneeling, eyes open and staring at nothing - this was an image that made a ruin of his heart, tore at his emotions, demanded action. It did not matter that they would fix this. He would see her lifeless in his nightmares.

The sight of Beauregard Lionett, trembling violently as she clutched desperately at the furs across those great shoulders, unheeding of the shrapnel jutting from between and under her fingers as her own eyes remained wide and haunted, might prevent him from ever sleeping again.

He knelt slowly, his eyes on Beau's, her eyes on the cataclysm happening inside of her. She gave no sign of noticing him. Her entire body shuddered, eyes red and dusty face streaked dark with tears. She looked, in her complete shock and grief, so suddenly young to him. The very fabric of his soul seemed to groan with the feeling it was being torn in two. 

"Beau," he said softly. Nothing changed but her grip tightening on Yasha's body, a further shallowing of her own breathing. "Beauregard." A little more urgent, because now he could make out a bluish tinge to her lips and her wounds were not bleeding as profusely as they warranted. Taken with the shivering, a very grim picture began to take shape.

"Caduceus," he croaked. He had come up here alone in hopes of coaxing Beau away, reminding her that they could make this right. But there was nothing of Beau present here, and she was going downhill fast. He placed a hand over one of hers - cold and blood-slick - and turned over his shoulder to shout, voice shot through with fear. "Caduceus!"

Below, his friend looked up tiredly from beside an unconscious but breathing Jester and lurched to his feet, teetering slightly before Fjord snagged him and took his weight to help him close the gap to Caleb and to Beau.

Caleb looked back and forth anxiously, terror clawing at him. Caduceus was moving as quickly as he could, but Beau looked worse from moment to moment and it took everything in him not to rush them, to make any of this worse.

"Something is wrong," he blurted as they crested the last of the trail leading up. "She is here but she is not."

Soft face grim and spattered with mud, Caduceus reached forward without hesitation and touched Beau's forehead. Her eyes rolled back and she slumped immediately. Caleb made a desperate grab to prevent her from landing in the blood cooling on the stone of the cliff that had served as Yasha's execution site.

Caduceus's shoulders dropped with a weary sigh. "She's sleeping," he said. "I could only stabilize, but she won't fade away."

Caleb adjusted Beau's limp form so that her back rested against his chest and blinked up at Caduceus. "She was already unconscious?"

He nodded. "You were right to call out. Another few seconds and we might have needed two resurrections." 

All three of them turned to Yasha with the last word in their ears. With Beau no longer crouched in front of her, Caleb could clearly see the wicked dagger protruding from Yasha's chest. It didn’t even look like the worst wound on her, somehow. She had already been in a terrible state, barely hanging on when they had turned the corner to the makeshift encampment.

Caduceus closed his eyes, and Caleb could guess all too well the memory passing between the three of them - the thin smile of the cultist leader under his hood, the victorious plunging of the dagger into Yasha's chest as the ground erupted around them all. Celestial blood to summon a demon.

It seemed profane, to Caleb, that the event of Yasha being killed before them should be overshadowed by the awakening of the powerful entity that had not even left behind a body for Caleb to dream of setting on fire. In that way, Beau's reaction seemed to Caleb as a kind of bridge of that gap. The wild terror, the retreat of all that made her Beau, seemed closer than anything to the appropriate response. It was a reaction that was still all too familiar to him in spite of its many months of absence in the company of the nein.

"Caleb," Fjord said softly. Caleb blinked up at him, grateful to be pulled from his thoughts. "Do you have anything - the tower or a teleport, something?"

Caleb shook his head. "I have the dome," he said, "but I used too much in the fight to take us anywhere."

"That will be just fine." Fjord glanced worriedly at Caduceus, who looked about a moment away from passing out himself. "I'm gonna take Duces back to the others and come back for Yasha," he said. "Can you help me?"

On a normal day, Caleb knew he would be the least qualified member to try to move anyone anywhere. But with all three of their strongest members recovering, unconscious, or…worse, he knew that left him the most viable help. He nodded. "Of course."

As Fjord helped Caduceus limp down the stone pathway to where Veth fussed over Jester, Caleb looked down at the unconscious monk in his arms. "It is going to be alright," he promised Beau. "We have powerful friends, and we are going to get her back. We planned for this." He pushed away the part of his mind that insisted this had gone above and beyond what they had been prepared for, the part of him that demanded to be allowed to cave in just a little. 

He refused, held his ground. He would be here for them, for all of them - especially for Beau. He pressed a hand to her cheek. "Rest, Beauregard." He eased her gently onto dry stone, took a deep breath, and turned to Yasha.

He ached to see her this way. Yasha was for him a kind of stone pillar, an idea made stronger by the fact that she was finding her way as much as he was. He had seen her throw a fight in favor of self-flagellation less than a month ago, had bought her a drink in solidarity and let her hug him even more recently than that. She was as much his as any of the nein, and so it was with that sense of belonging that he shuffled forward the few inches so that their knees almost touched and, with gentle fingers, undid the gag and laid it on the ground beside them.

His eyes roved over her, noting with sorrow the violets they had found yesterday - was it only yesterday? - peeking in sad shreds from her braids. "There is so much I want to say to you, my friend." He touched one of the violets that looked mostly whole with reverent, steady fingers. "So much," he murmured, "but I will save it for when we are calling you back home to us. Right now, there is work to be done." He pressed a soft kiss to the top of her bowed head and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the dagger he had thus far avoided looking at. He braced the other hand against Yasha's shoulder - she was still warm, and that was almost the worst part of all of this - and pulled it out of her with a mercifully quick sliding sound. 

For a moment, he just sat with the blade in his hand and tried to breathe. It seemed odd that the blood staining its shine should be indistinguishable from any of their foes, that there was no discernible divinity swirling within it. In the sullen cloud cover above them, there came a rumble.

"Piss off," he said tiredly to the sky. "If you really want to help, don't let her in until we have said our piece."

Whether it was her god or not, Caleb was able to pull his focus back. "Time enough for that later," he said to himself. "Let's get you down from here." He knelt behind Yasha and used the dagger to start working carefully at the leather binding her wrists to the post.

Yasha was heavier than Beau, and he had fresh cuts on his arms from the wood and metal embedded in the furs he had carefully pulled from around her shoulders, but at last he had her lying next to Beau and her eyes gently closed. They were almost touching hands, he thought dimly as he sat and panted above them. He rested his head on his knees and took deep, steadying breaths - the kind Beau had taught him during one of his earliest panic attacks all those months ago. It would be alright, he told himself. Fjord was coming, and then they could begin setting this right. He wrapped his arms more tightly around his knees and waited.


	2. I'm Only Honest When It Rains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's time to bring her home, but there are preparations to be made and emotions still running high.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't intend to wind up needing three parts, but the good news is that the cliffhanger is not so harsh this time.

They agreed it was best to remove Yasha's overshirt so the holes could be mended front and back, and then Caleb had been unable to stand the thought of leaving her boots on and had worked them off gently too before collapsing next to Beau's sleeping form. It was not their usual arrangement - Caleb was acutely aware of whose spot he was filling in by being here. But the thought of Beauregard waking up with nobody in Yasha's spot seemed worse to him than her waking up with him there to help, even if he was not the right person, so here he would be.

"Jester," he called softly, and she turned her worried eyes to him as she finished folding Yasha's shirt to place it under her head. "Will you sleep on the other side of Beauregard tonight? If she wakes up in the morning, I…" he couldn't bring himself to tell Jester about the terror that had overtaken their friend. "I think it will do her good to have us both watching out for her." 

Jester nodded. "Of course." She seemed motivated, if not necessarily pleased, by the idea of doing something more to help. She curled up carefully against Beau's back so that her face was close to Caleb's over Beau's head as she slept on, unrelaxing, and Jester's tail curled from behind to wrap securely around Beau's calf. Caleb might have imagined it, but Beau's face seemed to smooth perhaps a fraction of a degree in the indistinct shadows of the dome.

Yasha's body was arranged carefully on the other side of the dome's radius, and Caduceus was stretched out next to her. He looked asleep already, and Caleb couldn't blame him. Fjord sat up beside him, seeming restless in spite of the lines around his eyes.

Yasha belonged to all of them, he knew, and the understanding they all had when they had set out to find her - that she might be dead, that the worst may have happened - did not translate directly to appropriate preparation to watch it happen before their eyes. Though Caduceus had planned for the ability to reverse what had happened, Jester going down in the fight had demanded his immediate abilities...and that, too, was not nothing.

He brought his eyes back to Jester's face as Veth curled into her usual ball against his back. Jester was watching Beau sadly and tracing a finger along the line where her undercut switched from short to long. "You did good today," he murmured to her. "You saved all of us, I think. Are you okay?"

Jester frowned a little and didn't look up at him. "I made Caduceus waste his spell," she whispered. "We could have had her back tonight, for Beau to wake up in the morning." She sniffed. "Now she will wake up and Yasha will still be dead, and she doesn't deserve that."

Caleb reached over Beau to touch Jester's shoulder gently. "Hey," he said. "I have spoken to Caduceus about the ritual. Do you know how it works?"

She shook her head miserably.

"There is a component to it," Caleb explained. "It requires that three people bring some kind of offering - be it something tangible, or words, maybe even just the right emotion - and use it to persuade a soul to return."

Jester met his eyes, her own glistening a little in the dim glow of the dome. "Beau should be part of that." 

Caleb nodded. "Exactly. She will be glad to have the chance, I think." 

Jester tried for a smile, lifting her hand from Beau's hair to loop over his arm. "Thank you, Caleb. I still feel a little stupid but not as bad."

"That is alright." He rubbed a thumb comfortingly over her sleeve. "I will take that as an improvement. Now let's get some sleep so we can face this tomorrow together."

****************

He woke before anyone else - most importantly before Beau. In the night, she had curled in on herself and pressed her head to Caleb's chest, her arms folded like a barrier over her stomach. She slept fitfully even now as he watched her, his heart slowly refilling with yesterday's exhaustion and sorrow. Today, they would return one of their own to them. But there was more to this than the ceremony itself.

He would not quickly forget the look of terror that had replaced the slight sleeping frown she wore now. It was too easy for him to find it hiding in the lines of her brow, the twitch of a cheek. Dread pooled in him even as he worked to remind himself: she had been in shock, she would wake up stronger today, it would be okay. He could help to make it okay.

She didn't keep him waiting long. He felt the exact moment she woke, because it was the moment her twitching ceased completely and a deep inhale sounded from under his chin. He drew back to find her blue eyes waiting for him, clear and steady.

"Where's Yasha."

It would be easy to blame the crack in her voice on the early hour, but Caleb had no such misgivings. "Waiting for us to call her home," he said softly. He tried to project peace across their eye contact, but he had to settle for desperately hoping he was keeping his own feelings hidden - or that she was not in a position to search them out.

It didn't matter; Beau had already dropped her eyes and curled inward more tightly. As Jester began to stir on Beau's other side, Caleb touched a hesitant hand to Beau's hair and stroked it gently in the way Jester had last night. Beau made a ragged sound and pressed into him, not away, and so they lay that way for several minutes as everyone began to wake around them.

"She probably needs to be cleaned," Beau finally said, minutes later. Her voice was dull, eyes far off. "I should…she shouldn't wake up covered in blood and dirt." Her fingers balled tighter as she started to shake just a little. "I can't let her -" Caleb could see her steeling herself to turn over and look at Yasha's body, and he gripped her arm at the same time Jester locked her legs behind her.

"Look at me, Beauregard." He could see the panic starting again deep in her eyes, but they reluctantly found and held his. This, too, was an improvement. "You are among friends," he said. "We are all here today because she is ours, something precious to each of us." Beau searched his face, the fear not yet receding. "You are right, we will make certain she wakes as whole as we can make her." He softened his voice, low and earnest. "But you do not have to do this alone."

He hadn't realized she'd stopped breathing until she inhaled harshly, closing her eyes. "Yeah," she whispered. "Okay. I think…I think I need to leave it to you guys. If - if that's okay."

She didn't resist when he pulled her closer to him, nor when Jester reached around them both.

"We will take such good care of her, Beau," said Jester.

Her breath was hot on Caleb's collarbone. "I know."

****************

While Caduceus focused on the lines and the circle in preparation, Caleb knelt at Yasha's side and dabbed a damp rag over her torso. There were so many wounds - too many - but the blood came off by degrees and within the hour, she was recognizable as the friend they knew and loved. The angry gash over her heart galled him to be unable to fix, but he did his best to remind himself of what was to come, that it would fade with the rest.

Jester spent the hour knelt with her hands in Yasha's hair, removing the bits of wood and metal - even dried blood where she could coax it out with her blunt claws. A few feet away, Fjord and Veth sat with Yasha's furs spread across their laps, picking out the grit and detritus before Jester leaned over to cast mending on it too.

They worked together in silence broken only by Caduceus's ritual until finally, Caleb sat back with a sigh and glanced over to Beau. She was sitting with her knees drawn up, as close as she could come without breaking down. Her eyes were spacy but trained on Yasha's face, and they slid to Caleb as he watched her. He offered what he hoped was a reassuring expression. Beau's eyes moved back to Yasha, but her shoulders smoothed almost imperceptibly.

"Three people will have to speak to her." Caleb spoke as though to Jester, loudly enough that everyone was able to hear. "I wish to be one of them, but as we are almost ready to begin, perhaps it would be wise to decide who among us will call her twice more."

"I would like to." Caleb turned in slight surprise towards Veth, who had moved up to lean against Beau's side and watch with her. Her gaze flicked uncertainly across the faces of the others as though she expected someone to protest.

"Ja," he said quietly. "I think that will be okay."

"I don't think I have much in the way of sway in calling her back," Fjord said from his position next to Caduceus. "If there's any chance we might have to...make some kind of a case for her to come back, then it should probably come from Beau." He smiled kindly at her. "She'll listen to you."

Caleb had hoped not to put Beau directly on the spot, but with the suggestion out there he turned soft eyes to her. She had gone white at Fjord's words, tension ratcheted up further so that she resembled nothing more than a Beau-shaped ball of sadness and stress.

He got up and crossed the fifteen or so feet to sit down again across from her. "Beau," he said softly. "There is no pressure. Remember what I said. You do not have to take this on yourself." Beau glared up at him, but her expression was fracturing even as she made it.

"What if she doesn't want to come back?"

Caleb grasped her elbows and tilted his head down to look her solemnly in the eye. "We are her family," he said firmly. "She promised to stay. Yasha is a woman of her word. She will come back to us."

Beau's back heaved with the sob she was suppressing with all of her might. "What if she's with Zuala, Caleb? If she's happy?" He blinked, surprised. Her voice, always strong and so sure of itself, cracked. "I can't ask her to make that choice." 

Silence reigned for a long moment, and then she took a deep, shuddering breath and continued. "You're right. If I call, she will come back. She promised, but…" her eyes sought his, groped desperately for a handhold. "I don't know if I could live with it if she resented me for holding her to it. I don't know if I have the right to ask."

Caleb's heart, exhausted from the last twelve hours, found a final reserve of grief and twisted inside of him. He didn't know what to say to that. He understood Beau perfectly, and that was the trouble. Because if it were him, he would be thinking the same. He didn't know what Beau needed to hear, how to be sincere when he knew he would be just as trapped in her position.

His ability to say all the right things, it seemed, had run out when Beau needed it most.

"Beau," Jester spoke up quietly. "I have to tell you something." Beau looked up past Caleb to Jester as she approached, leaned into her slightly when she knelt and put her arms around Beau's shoulders. "I talked to Yasha," Jester began. "About you."

Beau swallowed and blinked hard a few times before replying. "Yeah?"

Jester's tail wrapped its way around Beau's calf and squeezed it gently. "I wasn't going to tell you," she said. "Yasha asked me not to. She wanted to tell you when she was ready."

Hurt and confusion flickered across Beau's face as she processed. Caleb could see her running through every possible worst case scenario, and he touched his foot to hers to ground her.

"I think you need to tell her," Veth said from Beau's other side. She looked a little timid when all three heads turned to her. "It's just that Yasha can't speak for herself right now, and she would say it if she could." She looked compassionately back from Beau to Jester and added, a little more strongly, "So I think you have to do it for her."

Jester nodded. "Yeah." She pulled back just a little and placed a hand on Beau's cheek to turn her face to hers, taking a moment to search her face and push a strand of her hair behind her ear. "Beau," she said. "Yasha loves you." 

Beau's eyes threatened to spill over and she flinched away, screwing them shut. "Don't say that, Jester," she croaked. "You can't know that."

Jester held onto her firmly. "I do know that. You've been waiting on each other for a long time, Beau. She said she hasn't kissed you because she was worried this might be a crush for you, but I told her that's not true and she said she wanted to talk to you soon."

Beau's fingers where they gripped her knees were white. 

"You can call her back," Jester insisted. "I know if she hears it from you, she will come back. But it has to come from you."

There was a flash behind them, and then Caduceus's voice cut through to them, kind and steady. "It's time."

Caleb nodded to him and reached to grasp Beau's face and press their foreheads together. "We will do this," he said firmly. "I will go, and Veth will go, and then you will bring her back to us. Ja?" Beau looked uncertain, but she nodded. "She may have told Jester directly," he added, "but she didn't have to tell the rest of us. Her feelings for you have been very clear to us."

As he stood, one of Beau's hands released her knees to grasp at his fingertips.

"Put in a good word for me," she managed. "Just in case when it's my turn, I-" She broke off, looked away. "I'm bad at this stuff, man."

Caleb squeezed her fingers with his own. "So am I," he said, smiling. "But I will slip something in for you."

Beau nodded thanks and released him, and he heard the rustling of Jester and Veth helping her to her feet behind him as he strode forward to the circle of light around Yasha and knelt beside her. A harsh breeze kicked up as he reached to touch the upturned palm of her hand, and a blue spark passed between his finger and her skin so quickly that he almost missed it in the soft green glow of the magic. He looked up at the clouds, as dark as they had been yesterday. He thought he imagined a rumble.

He looked back down to Yasha. He had seen innumerable dead bodies over his lifetime. Most of them looked as though they had died in horrible pain, and that was because they often had - at their hands. He had seen some who looked simply asleep, but that did not fit here either because Yasha did not sleep on her back, she slept facing whatever direction was most likely to bring danger or, barring any, facing Beau.

"Hallo," he said thickly. He cleared his throat, started again. "I could spend an afternoon here, thanking you for being my friend and for what you have done in the name of protecting this family." He hesitated, mouth quirking into a small, wry smile. "I could apologize for much of the same, and then we would be here for many days. But there are others waiting to bring you their reasons to come back to us, so I will be as brief as I know how to be."

He rubbed a thumb over the top of her cold hand. "Know this, Yasha Nydoorin: The Mighty Nein are your home, and you have wandered far from us, where we cannot follow. If you are at peace where you are, we cannot pull you where you do not wish to go." He sighed. "The truth is that we have no true power of death, nor over you. And that is good, I think. So much has been done to you without regard for your own will." He gently squeezed the hand in his. "But I am asking," he said, "on behalf of us all, for you to find your way back to us for a while longer." After a moment, he leaned forward and whispered in her ear, in Celestial: "She needs you."

The wind kicked up again, and this time he didn't imagine the rumble overhead. A few small splicks of rain dotted the stone around them, and he wiped one from her brow before getting to his feet with a nod and walking back to the edge of the circle. He laid his hand briefly on Veth's head as she passed; she touched his thigh and approached.

She didn't kneel like Caleb, just leaned over to peer at Yasha's face as the rain picked up a little around them all. In her arms was Yasha's fur cloak, brought back to much of its usual shine and softness. She spread it over Yasha's chest and tugged it neatly up under her chin, then rested a small hand on her cheek.

"I'm not sure why I thought I should take one of these spots," she confessed. "I just couldn't bear the thought that if for some reason you didn't come back, that I hadn't tried to tell you that you're my friend and I want you around." She swallowed. "I may not need you like Beau or Caleb - and I hope you know what I'm saying because it sounds _way worse_ out loud than it did in my head, but." She smiled a little. "I think sometimes I like being wanted more than needed, you know? You don't need me either, but you make me feel wanted. So you ought to know it's true for me too. I don't…do friends so much. Not many of us do, I mean look at us, we're a bunch of weirdos."

The rain was coming in more harshly now, and Caleb pulled his coat around him as he eyed the darkening clouds overhead. What had started as dismal gray was rapidly becoming black - what should have been the morning light was almost pre-dawn in the gathering dimness. Unease set behind Caleb's breastbone, but he smiled at Beau when her uncertain eyes slid to his.

Veth noticed it too, looked up and let the rain fall for a long moment. "I don't know if that's you or not," she said, "but I hope it is and I hope you get your ass down here." Her eyes cut to Beau. "For all our sakes."

As she made her way back to stand next to Caleb, her hair whipped across her face and her arm came up to shield her eyes. Caleb opened his coat for Veth to squeeze in close to his leg and nodded to Beau as Caduceus called over the wind. "We need one more. Beau, I think you're up."

How his voice remained calm and reassuring at the volume it took him to reach them was beyond Caleb, but his words seemed to fortify Beau as she stepped forward to kneel next to Yasha. Though the few loose strands of her undercut whirled around her and the rain lashed - harder now, larger - her face was completely calm.

She leaned forward and grasped Yasha gently under the shoulders, fingers supporting her neck, and lifted her just slightly to her bent knee. For a moment she simply tried to keep her expression from crumbling, and then she grasped Yasha's other hand with her own and kissed Yasha once on the lips, achingly soft. Her shoulders heaved just once, and then she buried her face in the furs at Yasha's chest and held on tight. He saw her breathing hard, seeming to gather herself to speak, and then a peal of thunder seemed to shake the cliff above them as a ribbon of lightning arced down to the spot Caleb knew in his bones was where Yasha had been killed.

The air around them seemed to waver. Electricity began gathering again in the center of what was now clearly a giant spiral above them, its center directly overhead.

As he watched the clouds spin slowly, something like hope and terror rose in him - along with the hairs on his arms and neck. They were next; he could feel it. Caleb glanced back down desperately at Beau, who seemed unheeding of the danger coalescing above her. "Beau!" he called. "Get out of there!"

His words were snatched by the wind - he knew she couldn't hear him as clearly as he knew he wouldn't get to her in time. But he had to try - the thought that this might go wrong, that he could lose both of them, was too much. Caleb stretched out a hand and took a step forward.

He heard Veth shout something to him, and then she clutched hard at his knee with both hands. Startled, he stumbled forward and caught himself in a kneel. Veth shouted again, and this time he could just make it out. "It's okay!" Caleb watched Beau look up, mouth open just slightly, and then the skies opened and he threw an arm over his eyes as the world turned to light and sound around him.

It couldn't have lasted for a moment, but Caleb felt he sat frozen for a small eternity while every one of his instincts clamored to tell him he was dead, that there was no surviving what had happened. Everything in him echoed into nothing, reverberated, came roaring back in a way that bypassed his sense of sound and seemed to shake the very pylons of his bones.

And then it was over. He forced his head up over his arm, squinting as his sight returned by degrees. Even the ten feet between him and the scene before him was hazed with heavy, gray rain.

Or it would have been, had Yasha not been _glowing_.

He could see them clearly in the light that came from inside of Yasha, the light that spread along her outstretched wings, crackling and snapping over her body and Beau's. She was sitting up now, her face pressed into Beau's shoulder and her strong, bare arms wrapped with one around Beau's ribs and the other clutching the back of her neck in a grounding, desperate hug. The tattoo that curled down her arm was lit a dazzling and ethereal green, and the bolts of lightning that flared across them were a wild and vivid blue that seemed so intangible that Caleb couldn't be certain if he was seeing the bolts themselves or some kind of ghostly afterimage. It made his head feel fuzzy in a way that he dimly recognized as otherworldly, and he could not tear his eyes from it. 

The wind had calmed with the explosion of lightning; only the rain remained beating down over them all as Yasha raised her drenched head from Beau's shoulder to look over them all with glowing, crackling eyes. Caleb was pinned in place by the stare, but the terror the storm had brought had been replaced with a deep calm as Yasha's mouth opened and a voice like thunder came from inside her, around her, above them, from within Caleb's own mind:

_"Worthy."_

The light flared, the bolts snapped, and then they and the rain were gone in an instant. When Caleb's whited out vision cleared again, the clouds were parting, rolling away from each other until a beam of radiant light pierced through to bathe the stone and brush and grit around them in the orange light of sunrise.

Caleb looked around at his friends as they shook themselves free of the stupor and began to move to the two figures still embracing in the light, holding on as though to let go would be to destroy them both. Caleb stumbled the few steps forward and dropped to the ground beside them. He placed a shaky hand on Yasha's leather-clad knee where it showed under Beau's, and one of Yasha's hands slid from Beau's back to grasp his. This close, he could see tiny sparks still flaring and fading in the residuum of her tattoo in mesmerizing patterns. He reached up and touched Yasha's wing in awe, saw her smile just a little over Beau's shoulder.

"I heard you," she murmured. Her eyes opened, familiar green and violet once more, and took them in one by one. "I heard of all of you." She met Jester's teary-eyed smile and Veth's awed expression and extended her other arm to hold them close to Beau's back. Her wings dissolved as Caduceus and Fjord moved to stand with a hand on each of her shoulders, and for a moment they all just breathed each other in contentedly.

"What was it like?" Veth finally asked. She pulled back to get a better look at Yasha's face, and it felt like a kind of pleasant tension breaking. Everyone moved a little further away to sit in a loose semicircle around her.

Everyone except Beau, who only pulled her limbs in tighter and seemed very far beyond caring if anyone saw. Her fingers were balled into fists and curled against Yasha's spine. Caleb could just see part of her face where it was still pressed against the spot where the dagger's scar would be, if there was one. She looked like she was trying to hide, though not necessarily from him.

"It was…bracing," Yasha said quietly. "I had to fight my way back. The Storm Lord, he…" she hesitated. "He is about worth, and proving it. He wasn't going to let me come back without a fight." Her thumb where it rested on Beau's tattoo was moving gently now, soothing strokes back and forth.

"You had to fight to come back?" Jester gasped. "He wasn't going to _let you?_ "

"I don't imagine Kord to be the kind of god who gives up a zealot like Yasha so easily," Caduceus commented mildly. He looked tired but pleased, and smiled at Yasha when she looked up at him.

"Yeah, who'd give up Yasha?" said Veth.

"Not us," said Fjord firmly. He gave a nod when Yasha's eyes turned to him. "We're glad to have you back." She returned his nod with her own smile.

"Was it hard?" Jester's eyes were big with concern, even with Yasha before them and whole.

Yasha considered. "Yes. I was alone for most of it. We fought for a long time and it was getting harder to hold on." Her gaze cut to Caleb, crawled inside of him, pinned him there. "And then suddenly, I had help." Her eyes turned to Beau in her arms. "I never forgot my promise," she said, almost to herself. "But hearing from you was the strength I needed to quit just...holding my ground, and beat him back."

It occurred to Caleb that some indeterminate part of her words might have been for Beau alone. He didn't mind.

Silence for a moment, and then Caduceus spoke up gently. "Speaking of strength, you must be exhausted."

Yasha took a deep breath, and Caleb watched a shadow flicker over her face - the only indication so far that she remembered any of what she had gone through yesterday. "I think I am," she said softly. "It just…not yet. I don't feel tired yet. But it's coming."

Caduceus nodded. "It affects everyone differently, I think. Caleb?" His kind face turned to him. "Would you take us home?"

He nodded. "Of course." His eyes fell to Beau, still holding on for dear life, and up to Yasha's face. She smiled at him shyly and pressed the arm against Beau's back a little tighter. Caleb nodded again, this time to her, and withdrew his wand.

"Let us go home," he said. "Together."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually wrote the scene where Beau leans down to say something to Yasha completely independent of the song but it fit so well I edited some details. "I'm only honest when it rains/if I time it right, the thunder breaks/when I open my mouth/I want to tell you but I don't know how." ("Neptune," by Sleeping At Last)


	3. When It's Over, You're the Start

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You're my head, you're my heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kept thinking I was done and then I kept not being done. Or they didn't.

Yasha knew by the way Beau clung to her all the way to her room that it was going to take real work to coax her out of wherever her thoughts were. And maybe it should have needled her, that waking from the dead should immediately result in making sure Beau was okay.

But she'd died and she'd do it again for that very reason, so it didn't.

And she wasn't.

It turned out, though, that taking care of Beau was the exact distraction Yasha needed. When she was scrubbing the dirt and blood from the skin of Beau's shoulder, she didn't have to think about the hours leading up to the summoning. When her hands were grounded in Beau's hair and working the soap through it gently, the memory of the moment she had known she would not survive was that much further away.

When she was focused on Beau, she didn't have to think about being dead.

And there was much of Beau to take care of, even after her skin was clean and they were curled up on her bed - was it bigger than when Yasha had seen it last? - even after she made them both eat and drink a little from the tray two of the spectral cats had brought them. Fresh fruit, a small loaf of bread, cold water. Neither of them had expected to eat much, but the tray that disappeared with another cat was picked clean. And now? There was one distraction left, and it was starting to gnaw a hole in her somewhere deeper than her skin.

The thing was, Beau wouldn’t look directly at her.

Oh, she'd gotten close a few times, eyes flickering over Yasha's eyebrow or pausing at a spot just beyond her ear. But Yasha hadn't realized how much she was used to being seen by Beau, and a small and needy part of her felt cold, shunted outside the light of that gaze.

On top of that, it meant Beau was preventing Yasha from seeing her, too.

Now Yasha was lying on her back and looking up at the tensed muscles of Beau's shoulders in the mirror as she traced a finger along them - could just see the hard set of Beau's mouth in the turn of her head where it rested on Yasha's chest, right above the spot where there should have been a scar from the dagger. Memories began to stir again. Yasha blinked hard and tried to will them from her mind. It was harder now, with nothing else to focus on - with Beau not there to pull it out of her. So she'd been killed, big deal. It wasn't the first time. Nothing new, right?

Except it had been new, actually, every detail of it.

Starting with the awful knowing, the calm, cool certainty that had set in hours before it happened.

She saw Beau shift in the mirror, realized that her breathing must have changed enough for those sharp ears to detect. Of course, she thought, of course Beau would be listening to Yasha as hard as Yasha was listening to her. Beau's head turned, and her eye found Yasha's in the mirror. Yasha's heart leapt, but Beau's glance slipped away again almost immediately. Yasha startled when a calloused thumb came up to swipe gently across her cheekbone.

"You're crying," Beau murmured.

The care was there in her voice, the softness that promised safety, but Yasha couldn't make sense of its presence taken together with the last hour of feeling avoided. She swallowed, whispered, "I think you started it." She tried for a smile, but Beau didn't look to see it and her jaw set a little harder above them. She looked made of glass suddenly, like if any of the lean muscle or the shadows of her spine were to move, they would crack and shatter.

Loss yawned in Yasha as she reached again for a way to put the pieces together in a way that made sense. Beau's broken plea piercing through the howling wind and rain like a sunbeam, the way Yasha's broadsword in response rent the very fabric of the storm that was Kord, the way Yasha's will poured from her mouth in a scream that came like thunder and opened a hole in the sky to tumble through helplessly…the look on Beau's face from above as she slammed into her body and then from below as she opened her eyes and just held onto her.

It had felt correct, all of it. Holding her close, taking care of her, drawing the last strength she'd needed from _the need_ in the voice that had called to her. And she was here now, and Beau was with her, but not completely. She was holding back, either unable or unwilling to look at Yasha, and suddenly it felt like too much. Had she misunderstood?

She felt her chest stutter a little and knew Beau felt it too by the way her hands gripped Yasha's bicep gently and slid up. She was not rejecting Yasha, but neither could she let her in and Yasha had no idea how to set it right.

Another tear, this one hotter and faster. "Beau," she said softly. Her voice trembled. She let it. "Have I done something…wrong?"

Beau's fingers where they rested on Yasha's tattooed shoulder dug in hard - harder than Yasha suspected she realized, but she didn't mind. "No," she said ferociously, like the word had been lodged in Beau's throat until Yasha set it free. The truth of Beau's answer was there in the bruises her fingers were leaving in Yasha's skin - she inhaled and let it lend her strength.

"Then please," she said, eyes on Beau's anguished expression in the mirror. Her voice evaporated on the second word, thickened when she found it again. "Tell me why you can't look at me."

She didn't feel when Beau started to tremble. One moment she was still and unyielding, and the next she was shaking apart against Yasha. There was a question in her grip, and Yasha felt second away from unraveling it when Beau's voice scraped out of her again, breath coming hot against Yasha's skin. "What if…" she swallowed. "What if I look, and I wake up?"

For the second time in as many hours, Yasha felt herself plummeting through open sky, hurtling towards an impact she had no way to prepare for. She flashed back to the night she'd sat with her face buried in her hands at the end of Jester's bed, when she'd made a promise to her that should have been to Beau. She'd had time, then - so much of it. Later, she'd said. At the right time.

She had died without telling Beau, and this unbelievable moment that stretched between them - she hadn't misunderstood, Yasha was _everything_ to Beau - was a second chance that threatened to overwhelm her with how much she did not deserve it.

But Beau did.

And Beau needed her - needed her so badly that the force of her will had somehow inhabited Yasha, guided her to break the barrier and come back.

_Worthy._

Yasha's arms tightened around Beau's ribs and she flipped them over harshly enough to break Beau's hold on her with a pained gasp that had barely made its way out before Yasha was there to swallow it.

It was not a kind kiss. Nothing like Yasha had imagined all those times, nothing like what it would have been to kiss her midair on Rumblecusp, at the end of one of her brilliant rants, in the library asleep on her books. She hadn't planned for tears, or for the way their teeth scraped, or a strand of Beau's hair trapped under the hand supporting her own weight.

She hadn't planned on getting killed before she got to say anything, either, and now nothing mattered but making it right, driving the fear out of them both and leaving no path for it to ever return.

She pressed her forehead into Beau's shoulder as they both gasped for air. Beau's arms came up to tangle in her hair, and her cheek where it touched Yasha's was wet. "I'm going to sit up," Yasha rasped against her neck. "Please. I'm right here. Look at me." _Please see me._

Beau's eyes were wide and flooded when Yasha pulled away. So were hers, but it didn't matter. Beau was looking at her, and something restless and thorned inside of her was dissolving under the weight of it.

Beau's strong hand pulled Yasha down on the back of her neck again and she went willingly, this time meeting her halfway with a kiss that was no less powerful for being sweeter, no less aching in its gentleness.

They stayed in this one until they couldn't, until they broke apart to gasp for air and try to keep their shaky laughter from becoming sobs. As quiet settled over them again, Beau reached up with steady fingers to tug the collar of Yasha's shirt down and stroked her chest where the scar should have been with the back of her hand. Yasha shivered and closed her eyes, reaching up to cover Beau's hand with her own.

"I dunno if no scar is better or worse," Beau whispered.

"Worse." Yasha kept her eyes on Beau's arm, running her fingers all along the white nicks and cuts that were scattered up to her shoulder. Beau was watching her intently and didn't look away when their eyes met. "There's a…sensation there," Yasha continued. "Not exactly physical, just this sense of wrongness that doesn't match up with what I see."

"Yeah," said Beau. "They're like…'hey this happened and you survived.'" Whatever she was about to say next died in her throat. "Shit," she said.

"It's okay." Yasha's fingers tightened on Beau's, and she relaxed her weight so that she could lie half on her. "I didn't survive, but I'm here now." The words came out with hardly a crack, but Beau had turned her head and was looking at her - seeing her - in that inescapable way that made Yasha feel all at once safe and turned inside out.

Her fingers drifted through Yasha's hair. "Do you wanna talk about it?"

"Do you want to know?" She sounded defensive even to herself.

Beau opened her mouth, considered. "I want to know because it's something big that happened to you," she said slowly. "And if you want to talk, I want to be who you tell. But don't feel like you have to."

Yasha wormed a little closer and nodded into Beau's shoulder. With the ability to say no, she found it easier to say yes. But with the yes came the memories she'd been avoiding. "I want to tell you," she murmured into Beau's neck. "But not everything. Not today. It's…I don't know where I would even start?"

Beau shushed her gently, thumb stroking Yasha's jaw just below her ear. And it was almost too much, that Yasha was here in a position where Beau was comforting her, where Beau was protecting her. That was what _she_ did - what she had died doing…or what had led to dying.

And there it was again in her mind, the horrified faces of her family as they broke into the clearing, turned all eyes up to her immediately - as was intended. A dying rage had struggled, kept at bay far away inside of her by the awful magic - she wanted to call out, to fight, to do something, but she could barely lift her head to take the last look she thought she might ever get. She imagined she could still taste whatever had been on the rag they had gagged her with, something sharp smelling and vaguely sweet that made her feel slow and detached from her body.

They weren't even particularly powerful people, but they were many and had chosen their moment well.

Beau's voice broke through the memories, soft in a way Yasha wasn't used to from her. She took over for Yasha, paved the way. "I don't know where you would start," she said, "but for me it's the…" She hesitated. "I lost some time, after... I don't actually know much of what happened between watching him stab you and waking up in the dome." Yasha lifted her head to study Beau's furrowed brow. Beau had a mind every bit as sharp as Caleb's, built for analysis and strategy - Yasha had seen her countless times take control of a whole battlefield and herself.

The idea that anything could put a stop to that, render her without her bearings - it said more about the depth of Beau's attachment to her than the monk herself could have put words to.

And it burned, hot and sweet and painful. "I'm sorry to have scared you," Yasha said quietly. Beau's eyes cut to her, narrowed and difficult to read. She looked like she wanted to protest, but then her head dropped back against the pillow and she just pulled Yasha closer to her.

"We knew what we might find," she said. Her voice was low but steady. "Caduceus had a spell ready to go, but I think…" she frowned. "I think I saw him using it on Jester, when I was running past." Yasha absorbed that, filed it away for later. Beau still had the look, the question that wasn't making it to her lips. Yasha met her halfway. It was easier this time.

"What are you not asking me?"

She expected Beau to flinch from the direct question, to deflect or wave her off. But after a moment, Yasha heard her take a deep breath and felt her arm around her shoulders tighten just a little. "Were you afraid?"

That was not difficult. "Yes."

"Of dying?"

Yasha hesitated. A hundred answers warred for translation. "Will you kiss me again?" she asked.

Beau startled a little under her. "Yeah. Of course." Hesitant fingers touched under Yasha's jaw, guiding her willingly to meet Beau in a kiss that took its time, pressed against her edges and reminded her of softness and light - of all the parts of Yasha that shone brightest when Beau was in the room. She put Yasha back in her skin, just as surely as she had those few hours ago - just as she had been doing from the start. Beau was home, that place for Yasha to land, and against all odds she was here to bask in that warmth.

"I was scared I wouldn't get to do that," she whispered when they pulled apart. "That I'd never get to show you what you are to me."

"Show me as often as you like," Beau said gently. "But what made you ask?" She was smiling, but those eyes were staring into Yasha and _they saw_ \- Yasha felt herself being measured, searched, known. 

The thready bird-pulse under Yasha's skin, the tremor in her voice that came from the knowledge that the time for hiding was past - had ceased the moment her lungs had filled with that first breath. "I needed the reminder too," she told Beau. "That I'm here. That it's okay."

A lopsided and wry smile from Beau. "Looks like we're anchoring each other."

Yasha had seen that smile in other contexts and it occurred to her, in a vague but sudden sort of way, that they were wearing very little - a shirt and undershorts between the two of them. In a similar way, an underlying tension that had been running beneath the whole exchange resolved itself with the recognition that this was the part where, in another life, both of them would have stopped talking in favor of old habits. In the line of time where Yasha hadn't died, Beau was making an awkward innuendo that would go nowhere while Yasha was finding the excuse to go somewhere else to curl up in a ball and go back over every word she should have said.

Instead, they were bracing each other against the unspeakable. Yasha couldn't tell Beau about the despair, but looking at her six inches away, feeling their skin touching, she could see it reflected back at her and knew she didn't have to. They had been touched by the same specter of the Almost, were facing the same demons. There would be time for the rest.

For now, Beau was here grounding her, and for as long as Yasha had words to bring her, she would be content to be the altar at which Yasha could lay them down.

****************

"I heard you," Yasha said to her again later, as they faced each other lying sideways in the bed. Seeing had become touching, but it was the same grounded sense of security that led awed fingers to press into the hollows of ears and jaws and feather-light kisses to the fingers.

Beau inhaled jaggedly as Yasha's teeth scraped gently over her throat. "Yeah?"

Yasha "hmmed" agreement and made her way unhurriedly down to Beau's collarbone. "I didn't hear words, though. There was just this… feeling."

A quiet, amused scoff in her ear. "I didn't say much." She twitched a little when Yasha let her teeth fall a little harder. "Caleb said it was some kind of offering. Figured words would probably just fuck it up."

Yasha would never get tired of this, of having Beau here and hers and looking at her the way she was when Yasha pulled back to kiss her forehead. "It was what I needed."

Beau grew solemn, but her hand stayed on Yasha's cheek to drift a thumb back and forth over it. "Was he really not going to let you come back? Would he have kept you?" 

"I don't know," Yasha said truthfully. "I meant what I said to all of you. He isn't cruel, but he wanted to know how hard I was willing to fight. He seemed…pleased, when I pushed through him."

Beau's attention turned quietly to the mirror. For a moment, Yasha watched those blue eyes as they wandered the length of them tangled together atop the sheets, content just to breathe Beau in as she committed them to memory. Abruptly, Beau huffed a kind of laugh and reached up to pull the cord that closed the curtain.

"It's not the same," she said at Yasha's questioning expression. "You're right here. Don't need to look anywhere else."

Yasha smiled. "I am," she agreed, humming contentedly when the hand on her cheek slid to the back of her neck. She could feel another question brewing, let the sensation roll over her while Beau's fingers tangled thoughtfully in her hair. "Have you…" she hesitated. "I've got this feeling, something about what you said a few weeks ago. About how you're easier to bring back." She took a breath. "Have you died before, Yash?"

The memories stirred, but Yasha noted with a kind of detached satisfaction that the sting of them had been reduced to a shadow of their earlier might. She knew she was free not to answer, and so found that she could.

"I have," she said. "A few times, with Obann. At least three, but…" she trailed off for a moment. "It's hard to recall details, from the time with him."

Beau's hand rested undemandingly on her hip, rubbed slow circles on the bone as she frowned. "When we were looking for you?"

Yasha shook her head. "Before. In the years after Zuala, before I met Molly." Beau didn't look away at the mention of Zuala - a spark of joy flared in Yasha's chest, small and bright. "This time was different than those," she continued. "Once because I was up again so quickly, and a couple of times, there was just…nothing. A path, leading away, but I didn't walk down it." She shrugged a little. "Eventually a door would open, and I'd walk through and wake up again as easy as that."

She reached out to rub a thumb over the crease of Beau's frown. "So why did he go all 'prove yourself' on you this time, do you think?" she asked.

Yasha had given thought to this already, let the question simmer in her mind while she'd slipped into the soft shirt. There was a sensation like falling inside of her, coming closer, and she recognized the exhaustion coming even as she yawned before answering. "I don't think there was anything to prove then" she said. "I wasn't…I hadn't been chosen yet, maybe. I'm not certain, it's hard to know exactly when it was that he called me." She pressed closer, slid her thigh between Beau's and smiled at the thoughtless way hers folded around her.

"That's a little fucked up," Beau said. "Not caring if someone stays or goes until they…what, ripen? Decide they want something so he can test it?"

Yasha's eyes started to droop. "It makes a certain kind of sense to me," she said. She offered a slow kiss to Beau's jaw. "Don't be too hard on him."

Beau rested her chin on the top of Yasha's head. "He's a god, he can take it." She dropped a responding kiss on Yasha's hair. "Besides," she said. "I gotta give him points for style. You were glowing all over with your wings out, it was crazy."

Yasha giggled. "It tickled a bit," she confessed.

Beau was a warm and solid weight, and her heartbeat as Yasha pressed her ear to her chest began to lull her almost immediately.

Dimly, she felt Beau stir and struggled back to wakefulness as she asked, "Hey Yash?"

"Mrmm?"

"I…I'm really glad you came back."

Yasha squeezed her gently. "Always come back to you," she mumbled.

She felt Beau's fingers press gently against her spine under the shirt. "After you spend a million hours sleeping?"

Yasha managed an amused sound. "Three million, maybe two for good behavior."

Beau paused. "What counts as good behavior?"

But she was out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "No Light, No Light" by Florence and the Machine.


	4. There's Fanart????

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm losing my mind, this is incredible. First time I've ever had art created for a fic, and it was because people just liked it that much!

One of Two

Title: "Worthy"

https://twitter.com/Hiitsy_/status/1321068792814788609?s=19

Go give her some exposure while I hyperventilate in joy! And then check out the one under it!

AAAAAAHHHHHHHH??????

Two of Two

It takes a while for a post to show up in google, so follow this link for now and I will update this with an embedded thing soon!

https://avalencias.tumblr.com/post/633187764929773568/im-only-honest-when-it-rainsif-i-time-it-right

Gah I have to go lie down, this is all so cool.

**Author's Note:**

> Title of the fic from "Somebody to Die For" by Hurts.


End file.
